Blowing Smoke - Michael Wolraich [72]
Due to Horthy’s caution, the Hungarian Jews were relatively safe for a while. As the Nazis exterminated Jews in German-occupied territories, the Hungarian government dithered. But in 1944, Hitler concluded that his “moderate” ally wasn’t working hard enough to solve the Jewish problem. The Germans invaded Hungary and swiftly annihilated 450,000 Hungarian Jews, almost 70 percent of the Jewish population.3 George Soros and his immediate family survived because of the resourcefulness of his father, who arranged for George to assume a false identity and sent him to live with a Hungarian official.
The Conspiracy Theory of Society
After the war, George Soros finished high school and moved on his own to London, where he survived by working menial jobs while attending the London School of Economics. There he studied with the famous philosopher Karl Popper. Popper had written a book called The Open Society and Its Enemies that extolled freedom and democracy and attacked totalitarianism and Marxism. His work deeply influenced the young Soros. Years later, after moving to New York and amassing a fortune as a currency trader, Soros founded a charitable organization called the Open Society Institute to put Popper’s ideas into effect in Hungary and other former Eastern Block nations.
Incidentally, Karl Popper also coined the term conspiracy theory. He did not use the term to describe specific paranoid beliefs, as we do today, but as a general way of understanding the world. He defined the conspiracy theory of society as “the view that an explanation of a social phenomenon consists in the discovery of the men or groups who are interested in the occurrence of this phenomenon (sometimes it is a hidden interest which has first to be revealed), and who have planned and conspired to bring it about.”4
According to believers in the conspiracy theory of society, “whatever happens in society—especially happenings such as war, unemployment, poverty, shortages, which people as a rule dislike—is the result of direct design by some powerful individuals and groups.” Popper claimed that widespread conspiracy beliefs would lead to “heresy hunts, national, social, and class hostility.”5 Sound familiar?
It is certainly familiar enough to George Soros. After the Iron Curtain collapsed, Soros donated generously to Hungary and other Eastern Block countries, funding scholarships, university endowments, and science grants. In return for his generosity, anti-Semites in the new Hungarian parliament accused him of participating in an international Jewish conspiracy to bankrupt Hungary in order to restore communist rule—despite the fact that Soros had been an ardent opponent of Hungary’s communist regime.6
There is one difference, at least, between Hungarian anti-Semitism in the 1990s and the discrimination that Soros grew up with. In contrast to Hungary’s Nazi-era leaders, the new breed of anti-Semite denies any hostility toward Jews. For instance, Istvan Csurka, one of the most prominent leaders of the new breed, rarely says the word Jew. Instead he uses code words like non-Hungarian elements and cosmopolitan. He also insisted, “I am not anti-Semitic and never have been, and all my writings prove that.” Then he added, “But it cannot be excluded that some of those who won’t stand up for Hungarian renewal are Jews.”7
The International Jew
Anti-Sorosism first arrived in the United States in 1996, courtesy of an American expatriate in Germany named F. William Engdahl.bh In an article titled “The Secret Financial Network Behind ‘Wizard’ George Soros,” Engdahl connected Soros to the evilest Jews ever to roam the earth, the dreaded Rothschilds. He wrote:
Soros is one of what in medieval days were called Hofjuden, the “Court Jews,” who were deployed by the aristocratic families. The most important of such “Jews who are not Jews,” are the Rothschilds, who launched Soros’s career.8
The Rothschild family is the gold standard of global